WaPo's Capehart: GOP 'Sabotaged' Obamacare by… Not Giving it More Money

WaPo's Capehart: GOP 'Sabotaged' Obamacare by… Not Giving it More Money

The latest Obama talking point on the failure of the Obamacare rollout is that Republicans are “sabotaging” the law. Democrat spinmeister Brad Woodhouse tried that line yesterday, and evidently Obama’s friends in the media are playing along. Jonathan Capehart of the Washington Post makes the same claim in a rant at the Post‘s “PostPartisan” opinion blog, saying that he was “enraged” by the “sabotage of healthcare.gov.”

And how, pray tell, did the Republican Party–which could barely find the “on” switch on a computer last Election Day–sabotage Obamacare? By refusing to give more money to the Department of Health and Human Services than the hundreds of millions of dollars already allocated to the project, and by following the law itself in opting out of state-run exchanges. That’s “sabotage” to Capehart: letting the law run.

If you can’t build a working website for nearly $100 million (and over $600 million in related contracts), when the private sector can do it in a few days for no money, you’ve sabotaged yourself–and having extra users in more states would not have helped (especially when the administration’s repeated excuse is that they never anticipated the huge volume of traffic that turned up when the system went live on Oct. 1).

Democrats attacked reasonable Republican policies for health care reform. They passed Obamacare without any meaningful Republican input and without Republican votes. They refused to pass delays or fixes as the deadline approached. They laughed when the public blamed the Republicans for the shutdown that followed. No, Republicans have no obligation to fix Obamacare. That’s not sabotage. It’s one-party rule. Enjoy it.

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